Minimum viable messaging: Building messaging like products
How to apply best practices from modern product development to communications
For startups, the process of conceiving, building, and deploying technology (often called Agile Product Development) is nothing new. In fact, it’s more or less already been perfected by Silicon Valley companies. It looks, in brief, something like this:
Identify a problem a set of people (users) have.
Articulate a vision to solve this problem
Write code, build hardware, and do everything else needed to deliver a product with a set of features that solves the problem(s).
99.9% of startups do this via an MVP, or a minimum viable product. Rather than spending years internally iterating on a piece of technology behind closed doors before ever releasing it to users, startups release an MVP, and then iterate on it over time. This allows them to apply end-user feedback to improve the product and better align it with the problem(s) it's intended to solve.
Crafting company messaging fundamentally follows the same steps, except the product you’re delivering to market isn’t a piece of technology to solve a user’s problems, it’s words that explain what a startup does, how its technology works, and why its technology matters.
The product is messaging.
Treat messaging like an MVP
In a previous essay about general comms guidance, I shared one of my core philosophies:
You must simply Do The Thing. Start the project, start the essay, start the strategy. Just go. There is intrinsic value in progress; you’ll either succeed or identify what you’re doing wrong.
Nowhere is this more evident than in messaging. Often, founders want their messaging to be perfect before it ever sees the light of day, so they’ll endlessly iterate on it internally. But just like a product, it’s impossible to know if your messaging resonates with your intended audience unless you actually, you know, put it in front of your intended audience. There is a reason why Agile Product Development works — end users are the most helpful sources of information to make products better. Messaging is the same, so let’s call this Agile Messaging Development.
I recently worked with Civic Roundtable to overhaul their company messaging. Early on, one of the main sticking points was, “What are we, exactly? I feel like no term captures what we do.” “Collaboration platform” felt constrictive. “Purpose-built platform for public service” was too vague. We thought about “all-inclusive collaborative platform,” “knowledge-sharing platform,” “purpose-built, peer-to-peer collaboration platform,” and “secure knowledge-sharing and collaboration platform.” We were like Goldilocks — none were quite right.
After work and reflection on the most foundational, existential aspects of Roundtable, we landed on “government operations platform.” Their technology improves the way work gets done within public institutions and nonprofits, and what is that if not operations? It felt right, but at that point, we had only articulated a loose vision.
The founding team treated this terminology like an MVP, floating it to select prospects and customers while we were still building messaging. To their credit, they did this of their own accord, and we learned that “government operations platform” was working. Potential and current end users and other key audiences more quickly understood what Civic Roundtable does, what its value is, and why it matters. Our conviction, in concert with user feedback secured through Agile Messaging Development, served as the foundation for Roundtable’s messaging.
Be responsive, not reactionary
Another common mistake, especially in early stage startups, is to overindex on criticism and change your company’s path or identify because of it.
Messaging is the foundation of any startup’s brand, and to quote Jeff Bezos, "your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room." Changing messaging too often based on end user feedback will result in a muddled brand — the audiences you care about won’t really know what you do, or how it works, or why it matters.
Confusion hurts your business (I pity the sales people who can’t articulate what their org does in three sentences) and also allows competitors to fill the void and define you (spoiler alert: your competition isn’t going to be flattering. Giving them the opportunity to explain you to the market is bad).
When building a product, startups aren’t changing their product roadmap every single time any current or potential end user gives any feedback. Just imagine: One prospect wants new functionality you don’t offer? Shift all engineering resources to build that feature. Current customers want a different feature? Sorry prospect, we’re shifting all our engineering resources again! A random person posts a tweet complaining about the buttons in the platform? Change ‘em! 1% of respondents from a user survey are “somewhat or very unsatisfied” with the UX? Change the whole workflow, specifics be damned! The product and engineering teams would never get anything done working like that, and they’d never ship a coherent product to end users.
The same is true for messaging. It’s vital to collect end user feedback early and often, but it’s just as important to not overindex on any one single piece of feedback. Like product development, Agile Messaging Development works best when startups collect large amounts of data, synthesize the overall learnings, and then steadily apply them when it makes sense. If your messaging changes once or twice a year, that’s okay. Once a month? Way too much.
The path to Minimum Viable Messaging
Product development is a deeply specialized skillset which many technical founders have. But not everyone has the skills to identify, validate, and prioritize end users’ problems, build and deliver an MVP to solve those problems, and then iterate on that technology over time based on user feedback (I sure don’t).
But I do have the analogous skills for messaging. I know how to craft an initial vision and deliver an MVM — a minimum viable messaging framework. I know how to collate end user feedback and iterate on messaging over time to ensure that a company positions itself inline with its core audiences.
I am, much to my chagrin, not unique (though I like to think I’m pretty good). However, the ability to craft and deliver messaging is a skillset just as specialized as product development. Just like there are a bevy of startups empowering specialized team members to build and deploy products to end users, so too must communications be empowered to drive messaging. That means working hand-in-hand with the founding team, crafting an MVM, and bringing it to life through all internal and external communications motions.
The leap of faith
Building messaging is no easy task. There are choices and tradeoffs. A founder might want to highlight ten key differentiators that make their product stand out above the competition, but I promise, trying to articulate all ten all the time is a recipe for disaster. There might be five key audiences that matter to a startup, but prioritization is non-negotiable — if everything is important, nothing is. Balancing what the technology can functionally do at present with a founder’s vision for the future requires a deft hand.
Making these choices — meticulously deciding which words to use in order to capture and communicate what a company is, what it does, and why it matters to the market — is a risk. Choosing words that encapsulate the totality of a startup is fraught with opportunity cost. There’s no way to know if it’ll work.
The same is true for deciding the initial features for an MVP. You can’t pack everything in V1. Truthfully, building anything in a startup, where time is both the most precious and least abundant resource, requires trade offs. Building messaging may not come as naturally to founders as building products, but the process is the same. And arguably, it’s just as important.
People won’t buy your product if they don’t know what it can do for them.
Until you get feedback from users, you’ll never know if your messaging (or your product) really works. My advice? There’s only one way to find out: Ship it.
Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.